Staff Software Engineer, Card Issuing and Payments

Stripe•Seattle, WA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Stripe is a financial infrastructure platform for businesses. Millions of companies—from the world's largest enterprises to the most ambitious startups—use Stripe to accept payments, grow their revenue, and accelerate new business opportunities. The Issuing team owns the Stripe card issuing product end to end from the APIs and backend services that power spend cards, debit cards, and charge cards, to the dashboard and embedded components that businesses use to manage their card programs. We build the infrastructure and interfaces that let platforms and businesses instantly create, distribute, and control payment cards at scale, and we're responsible for the full cardholder lifecycle across commercial and consumer issuing. Issuing is expanding into new geographies, new card categories (stablecoin, healthcare, consumer credit), and deeper partnerships with major platforms. This is a high-impact, high-visibility role at the intersection of financial infrastructure, developer-facing APIs, and end-user product experience, and it requires someone who can lead technically across a complex, fast-moving domain.

Requirements

10+ years of industry software engineering experience, with demonstrated impact at a staff or equivalent scope (leading initiatives across multiple teams or systems).
Proven track record designing and shipping large-scale user-facing products with distributed backend systems that are both highly available and financially correct.
Experience leading cross-functional engineering projects end-to-end — from requirements through architecture, delivery, and post-launch iteration.
Strong API design instincts and the ability to build simple, developer-friendly interfaces over inherently complex financial and regulatory requirements.
Ability to influence technical direction and align multiple teams without direct authority, with excellent written and verbal communication across engineers, product, and leadership.
High ownership mindset—comfortable with ambiguity, able to define the problem and the plan, not just execute a predefined spec.
Clear, precise communication on complex technical topics for both technical and non-technical audiences.

Nice To Haves

Experience building or operating real-time transaction processing systems with strict latency and correctness requirements (authorizations, payments, ledgering, settlement).
Familiarity with card network protocols, BIN sponsorship models, or issuing bank integrations (Visa, Mastercard, or equivalent).
Experience in regulated financial services—compliance-aware system design, audit trails, financial controls, or KYC or KYB flows.
Background in embedded finance, card-as-a-service, or Banking-as-a-Service platforms.
Experience with high-volume event-driven architectures and the reliability and consistency tradeoffs they introduce.
Track record of mentoring senior engineers and contributing meaningfully to engineering hiring and culture.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the technical strategy for Issuing, including multi-year architecture decisions across backend services, APIs, and user-facing surfaces.
Own end-to-end technical solutions for critical systems, authorization flows, spending controls, cardholder management, and card program configuration, ensuring they are reliable, scalable, and operationally sound.
Identify and lead infrastructure investments that unlock new issuing models, including geographic expansion, new card program types, and platform-level extensibility.
Collaborate closely with product managers, design, and cross-functional partners across Issuing, Authorization, Clearing and Settlement, and Balances to drive cross-cutting initiatives from design through launch.
Make principled build-vs-reuse decisions and produce clear technical roadmaps that balance near-term delivery with long-term platform health.
Advise engineering and product leadership on technical trade-offs and their downstream implications for the business.
Drive engineering standards, tooling improvements, and operational rigor across the team.
Mentor and grow senior engineers, investing in their technical development and helping build the next generation of technical leaders on the team.
Scope, design, build, and maintain APIs, services, and large-scale systems that reliably and efficiently handle billions of money movement requests.
Debug and solve critical production issues across services and multiple levels of the stack. Mentor engineers to help them grow.
Collaborate with stakeholders across the company to build new features at large-scale, while improving internal engineering standards, tooling, and processes.
Collaborate effectively in a distributed and hybrid team, maintaining open communication and strong connections with colleagues.